Study reveals how ‘rehabilitated’ postwar West Germany’s government was riddled with Nazis |
The diplomat at the West German Embassy in Washington who wrote the 1965 memo blaming “the type of Jewish liberal who has great influence in the modern communications industry” for a plethora of World War II television shows and films portraying Wehrmacht soldiers as “bad guys” most likely did not fear any repercussions for his antisemitic remarks.
With good reason: Bonn’s envoy to the United States at the time, Georg von Lilienfeld, was a former Nazi member who had worked in the Foreign Office censoring radio programs and devising propaganda aimed at America.
But, German academics have revealed, Von Lilienfeld was hardly unique in the upper echelons of the postwar West German civil service.
Earlier this year, the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin and the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam completed a six-year study of the personnel files of the Chancellery — one of the most powerful and important institutions in Germany.
Their findings, published this summer in “The Chancellery: West German Democracy and the Nazi Past,” show that, during the first decade of the new federal republic, two-thirds of those hired to work for Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had previously belonged to the Nazi party.
Among the bureaucrats working for the chancellor, who was elected in West Germany’s first postwar elections in 1949, were lawyers who had played a pivotal part in the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, administrators who had overseen the theft of property owned by Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and journalists and filmmakers who had worked in Josef Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry.
Reflecting the German chancellor’s central role in the country’s politics, the Federal Chancellery of Germany is comparable to the White House and No.10 Downing Street.
Gunnar Take of the University of Stuttgart, one of the four academics to conduct the research, analyzed the backgrounds of 107 senior staff in the Chancellery. Of the 73 people hired up to the year 1958, 66 percent had belonged to the Nazi party, and 20 had also belonged to party bodies such as the SS, SA or organizations such as the NSKK, or National Socialist Motor Corps, and the NSV, or National Socialist People’s Welfare.
During the remaining four years of Adenauer’s time in power, that figure fell to 32%, a function of the fact that, by that point, most of the top civil servants had begun their careers after 1945, says Take.
Among the senior staff recruited to, and serving in, the Federal Chancellery up to 1969, writes Take, Nazi membership was “the rule rather than the exception” in the older cohorts.
Take has also dug deep into the biographies of senior figures in the long-serving center-right chancellor’s office. He found that of the 50 civil servants born before 1918, only three had resisted the Nazis. The remainder either went along with the regime, joining the party or its professional bodies to advance or preserve their careers, or were officers in the Wehrmacht, high-ranking Third Reich officials or had served as administrators in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The most prominent senior Nazi official to have served in the Chancellery was Hans Globke. Adenauer’s top aide for a decade, he played a pivotal role in civil service recruitment.
During his time as a senior official in the Reich Interior Ministry, Globke helped draft laws and ordinances and provided legal commentaries on Nazi legislation. His commentary on the antisemitic 1936 Nuremberg Laws, “became ubiquitous in Nazi Germany’s courtrooms, offer[ing] many harsh interpretations of the rules,” notes a 2021 profile in The Times.
Globke’s work in the ministry was focused on ensuring that racial definitions were as clear as possible and their victims easy to identify. He was, for instance, responsible for drafting a 1939 law that required all Jews to adopt the first names “Israel” or “Sara.”
As the Reich expanded, Globke helped ensure the swift implementation of Nazi race and citizenship laws throughout........